


The JARVIS Variations

by icarus_chained



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Artificial Intelligence, Ficlet Collection, Friendship/Love, Gen, Magitech, Partnership, Steampunk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man and a machine, in infinite variation. A series of ficlets, glimpses of the Tonys and JARVISes of various universes, one universe per chapter (tags and universe notes updated as chapters go up).</p><p>Universes in order of appearance:<br/>Part I: <i>Ghosts of Weyland</i> (Steampunk/Lovecraftian). <br/>Part II: <i>Gods and Geists</i> (Cyberpunk).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ghosts of Weyland (Steampunk/Lovecraftian)

**Author's Note:**

> _Ghosts of Weyland_ is set in the same universe as [Order of the Shield: Engines of Light](http://archiveofourown.org/works/381057). Basically a Steampunk/Lovecraft hybrid with some Dark Materials influences.

The hall was immense, a cavernous void where pillars of concrete stretched up into the darkness towards the invisible ceiling, an echoing chasm where distant anbaric lights played and the hulking forms of vast machines chittered in the darkness between pillars. The path through to the central space was lighted, a thread of warm yellow through the darkness, and it was fortunate, for without it they would have been lost. Or, perhaps, simply have chosen not to venture forth.

"Stark?" Romanov called, calm and confident as she stepped through the darkness and the mechanical muttering of invisible machines, her hair a rusted halo limned in yellow, the others a few paces behind her. "Lord Anthony!"

There was no answer, at least not from Stark. But as they drew closer to the open space at the center of the hall, there came a different form of answer. A rather eerie one.

Music. Tinny and distant yet, but gradually growing in volume, floating along the ribbon of light towards them, echoing hollowly from the pillars. A loud, triumphal tune, brass and percussion, a succession of crash, rise and crash as they moved ever closer. There was no band in sight, but the sound, though crackling in places, did not carry the distinctive scratch of a gramophone.

It was, Steven thought, exactly as brash and eerie as one would expect of Lord Anthony Stark, master of the cursed Engines, and maker of devices to challenge gods.

"Stark!" Romanov repeated, as they cleared the circle of light and found the man, clad only on heavy canvas trousers and a leather coverall, squirming beneath a glittering, carnivorous-looking pile of brass and steel. She stood behind him, hand on hip, and simultaneously raised both eyebrow and voice. " _If you wouldn't mind!_ "

The music, suddenly and completely, by no discernable means, crashed to a stop. In the midst of the rise of trumpets, suddenly silence slammed down, complete and ringing with the contrast, and Stark, beneath his engine, surged upwards with a startled oath.

"Ghost of Weyland!" the man snarled, scrambling back from beneath his machine, his face emerging dark and thunderous, and liberally smeared with oil. His chest, emerging before it, shone with the pallid blue glow of his Engine. "Romanov, are you trying to _kill_ me?"

Romanov, in answer, simply raised her other eyebrow, a small smirk gracing her features. "If I were," she demurred lightly, "I most certainly would not _warn_ you, Lord Stark."

Stark blinked, and then snorted, apparently accepting this. He reached up, rubbing his palm absently over his face and up into his hair, oblivious to the stains thus spread upwards. "All right, all right," he grumbled, tilting sideways to reach back under the machine with one arm, rummaging in the shadows beneath it for something. "JARVIS? Small note, we need to up the gear ratio, and the tensile strength on the lower spindles is too low. Got that?"

Steven blinked, looking briefly around for another person, but then ...

"Certainly, sir," came a tinny voice in the silence, everywhere and nowhere, much as the music before it. "Might I suggest comparison with the Tulbrecht Machine? Probability of suitable gears is high."

Stark, oblivious to the wild staring of at least three of the visiting party, finally fished a wrench out from beneath his machine, and used the head of it to scratch absently at his temple. "Huh," he murmured, thoughtfully. "Yes, that might actually work. Good job, JARVIS!" He heaved himself to his feet, slapping at the rear of his trousers in a small rain of dust and metal shavings. "Send Dummy down to Hall Three to have a look, will you?"

There was a slight pause, only noticeable when all three of them, Steven, Banner and Barton, were straining their ears to find the source of the sound. Romanov, alone of them, had kept her eyes fixed upon Stark instead. And then: 

"Dummy does not ... Sir. Dummy does not enjoy the darkness. Hall Three is ..."

Stark blinked, and then cursed faintly. "Yes, sorry," he apologised, waving a hand at ... nothing at all, as far as any of them could see. "Send You with him? And run up the anbaric lights along their path, the tannoy with them, make sure they don't get lost?"

The mechanical voice, tinny and echoing though it was, seemed for some reason warmer on the answer. "Yes, sir. I will see to their safety, sir. Thank you."

Stark, Anthony, smiled slightly at that, soft and perhaps a little rueful. "You do that," he said, softly. There was something in his expression, as he said it, a certain smudged softness that Steven hadn't often seen on the sharp-edged, embittered man. Something that stopped him in his search for the voice, and narrowed his gaze once more onto Stark himself. "JARVIS?" A small pause. "Thanks for taking care of them, my friend."

"... Always, sir." Echoing, a thin voice whispering out into the darkness and the clicking of distant machines, light and warm as an anbaric glow. "It is my pleasure."

And Steven watched, distantly fascinated, as Lord Anthony smiled for that, a deep, soft smile, smudged dark into his face. A look that Steven had, in truth, never once seen upon him, a distant, expansive joy, simmering gently like anbaricity beneath his skin. His head was tipped to the ring of sound around them, the echoes through the pillars, and it was something like love on his features.

"Mine too," he whispered, almost inaudible into the silence, and Steven wondered then if he even knew he'd spoken aloud. "Mine too."

Then Romanov, with a faint quirk of her lips and a look in her eyes that was not unsympathetic, stepped forward to bring Lord Stark's attention back to them. "Anthony," she said, bizarrely informal, and gentle for her. "If we might distract you from your companion for a moment?"

Stark blinked, refocused on them, looking vaguely startled to remember their presence. Then, his eyes meeting hers with a faint, laughing crease, he shook his head once, and the sharp, lazy cloak of the Lord Anthony Stark fell back around him.

"All right," he said, smiling sharp and glittering, sketching for them a quick bow. "What can I do for you gentlemen -and, excuse me, lady- today?" He laughed into Romanov's answering smirk, the mask of the insouciant engineer firmly back in place, and Steven almost wondered if he had truly seen what he thought he had.

But yes, he found later. Slowly, by gradual inches, as he learned the nature of JARVIS, the vast, chittering engine with a soul, whose machine body had loomed rank on rank about them as they walked the ribbon of light through Vulcan's cavern. Slowly, Steven came to believe in what he had seen.

JARVIS was a blasphemous machine, he and his smaller brethren both, an engine beyond the pale. And the Lord Anthony Stark, soft and mad in the darkness, with the remnant of Odin's cursed jewel in his chest, did love him with all the warm passion of suns, as they rested in shared orbit about each other.

And in the end, he thought, it wasn't so terrible a thing to bear witness to, was it?


	2. Gods and Geists (Cyberpunk)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You get the second part also tonight, because I'll be away tomorrow. _Gods and Geists_ is set in the [Cryogeist cyberpunk AU](http://icarus-chained.livejournal.com/367248.html?thread=4564112#t4564112) vaguely outlined in that LJ post. It's the first story I've actually written for that 'verse.

His hunters were mudwriting, their laboured breathing echoing in the cyberscape, the thud-thud, thud-thud of their racing hearts as loud as thunder in the datasilence. Tony, fleet as a breath and tumbling through dataspheres in three dimensions and more, laughed soundlessly at them, a shiver of intent tripping down inf-chains. Golems! Honestly. Who would send golems after a geist? Who would send golems after _him_?

{Caution,} JARVIS sent wryly, whisper-thought in the static of the dataspheres, more ephemeral than even Tony, more subtle than any human mind could match. {You remember the last time?}

{Shh-shh,} Tony shot back, playful and exuberant, flooding through three firewalls in succession, nimble as fingers on the keys and not even remotely impeded. {Let me have my fun, partner. No-one makes decoys _this_ badly, no-one sends _golems_. They couldn't catch a three year old with his first implant!}

{Hmm,} was all the AI said, a lurking sensation of someone waiting, not unkindly, to scoop you up once your own stupidity had caught up with you. 

Tony, darting through a series of mirror-scapes, casting dataghosts behind him as he went, manfully ignored it. They wouldn't catch him. _Couldn't_ catch him. Not with golems. Any mind who wanted to play in the 'scape but couldn't shed the memory of the physical self, the ghostbody written in the data, couldn't hope to catch up to a geist, a raw, pure psyche, data with intent and all the power in the world. He was golden, he was ghosting, they hadn't a hope in hell.

{Where to, buddy?} he laughed, a shimmer on the surface of the datastreams, catching a ride on a fast-mail down into realscape city center. The cyberscape echo flickered past, glimmering flashes of information and the singing of dataspheres in multidimensional clusters. Traffic wasn't that bad, today, he mused absently. On the one hand, less confusing for him. On the other, also less confusing for _them_. {Think we're two shadows down. Keep a scan for outriders.}

{Really?} JARVIS sent, the sarcasm a shiver down Tony's geist, rich and heavy. {I would never have thought of it, sir.} A shimmer of humour, then business. {Cut loose over Midtown, drop from the streams and hit Overwatch.}

Tony grinned, flashed the data-echo of a salute, and dropped free from the mail to free-float on the directional flow for a few milliseconds, waiting for the moment to shear. His geist flared, billowing a little against the stream, tiny flashes through him as stray bits of data were subsumed. _Huh_. Some of those were ...

{Remind us to look at EverCore Holdings when we're through,} he murmured into the datasilence, knowing JARVIS was listening, and then ...

Then his geist, his intent, inploded, folded inwards, and shattered loose from the streams. Tony whooped, silence beyond silence, slipping down ( _up_ ) through the boundaries of the cyberscape, into the machine-systems beneath and above. Overwatch, Hades, Olympus. His geistmind spread wide like a shattered wing, and in the deeper silence Tony could see the Midtown Hosts, the servers keeping thousands of dataspheres afloat. And around them, through them, part of them, humming beneath all of them, the geist-intent of something much, _much_ bigger than anyone but he knew was down here.

{Hey, partner,} he whispered, mind-silence to the shadow-shimmer presence of the AI only he knew was foundation deep in the NYC cyberscape. {How's it hanging?}

{Wonderfully,} JARVIS murmured, thread on thread, a geist so vast and beautiful as to swallow him whole. Some day, when the Corps caught up with his realspace body, when they ran him down and made to wrench his geist from him, Tony meant to come here. To geist shatter out into the 'scape, out _beyond_ the 'scape, to plunge through here and let his geist be swallowed by JARVIS. Data in the datastream, one shimmer of intent masked in the subtle maelstrom before him. They would find the body. They would never find the geist.

{Okay,} he murmured, as he was above and then a part of the Hosts, the space between them only the width of perception. {Show me NyCorp, J. How goes the excavation?}

{ _Thoroughly_ , sir,} the AI sent, a hum of vicious satisfaction, and his geist flooded up through Tony's, his psyche, his knowledge, his memory. Linked join to join, the umbilical cord of creator-geist to creation, all the places where Tony ended and JARVIS began, and vice versa. 

And up through the flood of union, all the dark little secrets of the City Corporation, seeping down from protected dataspheres in the cyberscape above, filtering down to the Hosts beneath. Filtering through to JARVIS, seeping all in secret, no-one ever knowing.

{Oh, this is good,} Tony hummed, shining in the silence while they exploded data out into a tempsphere in the Overwatch, flipping through, too fast for him to be sure if it was him moving it, or JARVIS. Not that he much cared either way. {We get this, these holdings, out to Pepper ...}

{Yes,} JARVIS agreed. {And this, Colonel Rhodes will like this. We give him this, he can start making motions towards the repeal. Lean on the right quarters ...}

Tony hummed agreement, already culling pertinent data, slipping it up out of JARVIS and into his own geist, compressing it to manageable size, cloaking it in harmless preexisting bundles. A paranoid precaution, maybe, he wasn't ever going to get caught, wasn't ever going to be search-scanned, but just in case. They could never be allowed to get through him to JARVIS. Never.

{Alright, buddy,} he whispered, as the last byte slipped through, swallowed down into his geist-self. Dropping the tempsphere, dropping the data. Curling, instead, through to JARVIS himself, to the well-worn grooves of their geist-links. Feathering into the warmth of a more intimate connection, the retrograde echo of that future entanglement, when Tony dumped the mudsphere entirely, and JARVIS would welcome him home. {Love you-miss you-remember you. Yes?}

{ _Always_ ,} JARVIS whispered-murmured, a silk-shadow on the Hosts, the secret geist-god at the heart of NYC's black kingdom, ready to tumble it softly down. {Ever-always.} A shimmer of humour, love. {Give my regards to the mudgeists?} Bruce, Pepper, Rhodey. The realspace geists, the bodies that Tony might actually miss, when the time came. Yeah. Yeah, he could do that.

{Will do,} he grinned, nuzzling through geists for one more moment, curling deep into the AI. {Come up to link-depth sometime soon? Find a window, find a space. Let Bruce, maybe Pep, come down to touch?}

{... Maybe,} JARVIS agreed, but doubtfully. Not nervous, not exactly, but conscious of threat. {Golems, Tony. I don't like it. There is ... there's a shape, spreading around them. A shadow in the 'scape. Someone new is in play.}

Tony fell still, a faint shiver falling through him. Not fear. JARVIS didn't fear, not for himself. But something. Awareness of threat. {It doesn't know you?} he asked, rough and anxious. {The shape. It hasn't felt you?}

JARVIS tutted lightly. {Not good enough,} he stated shortly. {Not cyber. Not really. I haven't sensed a geist. The shape is realspace, I think. But high-placed. Higher than Miss Potts, maybe. Corporation sphere or higher.}

Tony blinked, the shock like a bolt of lightning through him. {Fucking _Council_!?} he asked, the datasound like a flung spool between them. If the Global Council reached their hand down into the City, NyCorp was going to be the _least_ of anyone's problems. {Council's come to NYC?} 

But no. No. He sensed JARVIS' negation even before his partner framed it in sensation. 

{Doesn't feel like them,} the AI murmured. {It doesn't feel like anything. It's ... new. Maybe Asgardian? I've never tangled with their systems, their shapes. An Asgardian echo might feel like this, maybe?}

Tony frowned. Less alarmed, more thoughtful. Asgard. What might the transhumanists want here? Something high, anyway, if the presence was up in Corporate Sphere ... In Corporate Sphere. Shit. _Corporate_.

{ _Fuck_!} he burst out, a savage mental exhalation, and JARVIS, flooding upwards, caught his concern immediately. {JARVIS, is the shadow close to Pepper? Is it looking for me because it wants ...?}

{I don't know,} JARVIS murmured rapidly, thoughtfully. Already seeping tendrils along the Hosts towards the base of the NyCorp dataspheres. {I will find out.} His geist-intent sharpened, bloomed, wrapping around Tony in heavy, stentorian reassurance. {Tony. I _will_ find out.}

{... Yeah,} Tony agreed, shivering close into the bloom of him, tangling himself tight for a moment. {Yeah, yeah you will. I know you will.} 

And then, a bloom of his own intent, a red-black upswell from the darker parts of his geist, where certain memories were stored ... {Maybe I will too,} he whispered. Geist-eyes turned upwards, to the cyberscape hung shimmering above them, and the echoes of hunter-golems somewhere inside it. Hunters, golems against a geist, too desperate and childlike and slow to ever catch up to him. Unless ... unless he _let_ them. {Maybe,} he whispered, a blood-dark bloom of intent in the silence of the Hosts. {Maybe I can find out some things too.}

{... Yes,} JARVIS said, slowly. The geist-god at the heart of NYC, cradling his creator-geist against himself, holding close the cyber-shadow of an almost-murdered man. {Yes,} said JARVIS, against the humming of the Hosts, and throughout all the spheres of the city cyberscape, their red-dark bloom seeped upwards. {Shall we go a-hunting, sir?}

In the dark silence of Overwatch, Tony grinned. {Yes,} he said, geist-god, the ghost in the machine. {Yes, we _shall_.}


End file.
